


Twist In My Sobriety

by Beguile



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Car Accident, Crisis of Faith, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Songfic, Spoilers for Daredevil Season 3, Surgery, Trauma, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-25 03:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beguile/pseuds/Beguile
Summary: All God’s children need traveling shoes, and Frank’s have carried him so far and away he can’t find the way back to himself.Or: an explanation for where Frank’s whereabouts during Daredevil season 3.





	Twist In My Sobriety

**Author's Note:**

  * For [titC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/titC/gifts).



> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> I understand why Frank was not included in the newest season of Daredevil, but it doesn’t mean that his absence isn’t palpable. This fic is an effort to bridge the gap. Special thanks to Dichotomy Studios, who kindly beta-ed this for me prior to posting. 
> 
> Inspired by the song “Twist in my Sobriety,” specifically the cover performed by Katie O’Connor, for titC. Thank you for organizing the exchange! Merry Ficmas, my friend, and a Happy New Year! I hope you enjoy!

* * *

 

               All Gods children need traveling shoes, and her shoes traveled her where she didn’t belong. Frank has a flashbulb memory of them when he wakes, her feet. Tiny little things in eggshell white, flowers or bows or something on the toe. Burned into his retinas by the sun beating down on them, tiny flares against the pavement.

               He blinks and the world is more muted. Powder blue walls, cheap curtains flapping on a breeze. There’s a vase of flowers on the table near his face, their scent covering up the more astringent hospital odours. Below that, a card, brightly decorated in crayon.

               Frank props himself up on his elbows. A headache radiates through his skull; he ignores it. Pain in his abdomen; he works through it. A pulse ox bites into his finger; he removes it. The hospital bracelet scrapes on his wrist; he checks the name, checks the date of admission. Pete Castiglione was admitted to the hospital three days ago, and the pain in his side tells him it was from something heavy, something big. Something that bust him open enough to warrant stitches over his liver, or maybe that was surgery. Frank can’t tell.

               He pulls himself free of the tubes, the monitors. Stretches his legs off the bed. But he doesn’t get far. Dizziness overwhelms him. He dry heaves. There’s staff in the doorway and fire in his side, and Frank slips, his strength giving out, the floor smacking hard against his knees.

               They put him back on the bed. The nurse fills him in on the details. Frank half-listens. He isn’t concerned so much with why he’s here, only how long he has to stay. They refuse to give him an AMA when he can’t stand, and Frank isn’t conscious long enough to argue.

* * *

 

 

               Television’s buzzing above the nurse’s head when he wakes. News running across the bottom of the screen. His attention bounces between the tv’s bad news and the nurse’s good news when he catches the words _New York Bulletin_ in the captions. “Turn that up,” Frank says. The nurse obliges him. He catches the tail end of the report: shooting at the _New York Bulletin_.

               “Oh, right,” the nurse breathes, “That. Six people dead, most of them reporters.”

               “When?” but it’s irrelevant. Frank doesn’t wait for an answer. He’s busy watching protesters demanding Fisk be sent back to prison. The hell is happening. The fuck is going on. How hard did he hit his head, he didn’t notice Wilson Fisk got released from prison.

               “Where’s my phone?” he says.

               “It was destroyed in the crash.”

               Frank reaches for the landline next to the bed. “You get me the number for the _Bulletin_.”

               “Oh, my gosh, do you know someone there?”

               “Number,” he demands.

               The nurse pulls out her own phone and makes the call.

* * *

                They really don’t want to let him out of the hospital. The head injury, they protest. Surgery. Frank tries to make it clear his leaving isn’t an option, but the second he tries to get out of bed, his side lights up in a firefight. Stitches pull against his skin. He can’t breathe till he’s lying back down, buzzing with a fresh shot of morphine, mind wandering. Pair of shoes in a sunny street. Gunfire. He should’ve been there. He should’ve been there and he wasn’t. He was lying here doing nothing, people dying on his watch.

               Frank tries to leave again the next day. He makes it to the door of the room before the nurse has to push him back to bed. It’s too much. The pain in his side, it’s just too much. Needs time he just doesn’t have.

               “You haven’t opened your card,” the nurse says helpfully.

               “I’ll get to it later,” Frank replies, but he isn’t going to, not really. Card’s addressed to Pete, and he ain’t Pete right now. Karen’s alive but unemployed, according to whoever he spoke to at the _Bulletin_. Fisk’s out of prison. Got some nutjob running around in the red pyjamas so the city’s dragging the Devil’s name through the dirt when it’s so easy to see this ain’t him. Red didn’t spend years punching bad guys in the face to start using a gun now, back from the dead or no.

* * *

                Frank gets out the day of Ray Nadeem’s testimony. His side is still a powder keg, simmering when he stands still and an inferno when he moves, but his head injury has subsided. The nurse, Beth, helps him track down his vehicle. She collects the wad of parking tickets off his windshield, too, and tells him not to worry. Least she can do for a hero.

               “Not a hero,” Frank tells her, hopping into the driver's seat.

               Beth knocks on his window. She hands him a paper bag. Some take-out. Dried flower petals from the bouquet at the hospital. The card. Frank doesn’t want it, but Beth insists. It ends up in the back seat, knocking at Frank’s spine like a toddler with cabin fever. He finally takes out the card at a rest stop, but he doesn’t open it. He stares at the crayon scrawl on the front. The word PETE in messy caps, the butterfly and flower doodles along the edges, the sticker of those Disney princesses, what are their names? Frank tries to tear it up, but he can’t bring himself to; his side throbs, and he shoves the card, unopened, into his glove box along with the flower petals. 

* * *

                Fisk goes back to prison while he’s crossing into New York state. That nutjob in the pyjamas gets shipped off to a private hospital, and the trail is cold by the time Frank gets to the city.

               He starts looking up numbers for Nelson, the only one of the three with any kind of connections to speak of. Frank ends up idling outside of a homey family-operated butcher shop. A sign in the window says Closed for a Family Function, but the function ended a long time ago because the only family Frank can see are Page, Nelson, Murdock, and a mostly-empty bottle of whiskey.

               Frank starts by watching her, but his eyes drift slowly over to Murdock. Rose-coloured glasses obscuring his face. It’s a miracle more people don’t see the Devil when they look at him, but they don’t know how to look the way Frank does. They never got to see that bloody smirk on the Devil’s face when he breaks free from chains or the rage that simmers under his skin just itching to get out. Page and Nelson bring out his smiles, his softness, but hell if his knuckles aren’t looking ragged. Hell if he isn’t hearing that siren song playing in the distance.

               The trio staggers out way past bedtime. Nelson hails a cab for Page, but he walks home with Murdock on his arm. Frank drives off, leaving them all in his rear view mirror.

* * *

                Next day, Frank rents a furnished room and brings in his meagre belongings. The card comes with him – he doesn’t know why, only knows that it does, taking a place of honour under his car keys and wallet on the dining table.

               The razor comes out. Frank’s got it buzzing in his hand before he realizes what he’s doing. He shuts the damn thing off, yanks the cord out of the wall, and charges out of the bathroom. He slumps down on the bed, unable to catch his breath. His side – the fucking thing’s on fire. His whole chest is on fire. Got an explosion inside him, pressing against the insides of his ribs, his skin, and Frank isn’t enough to contain it. Fire’s gotta go somewhere, but there’s nowhere for it to go. Got Fisk in Super Max. Got a cold trail on the shooter playing dress-up in the Devil suit. Got nothing and no one, so the fire can rage all it wants. Frank’s sitting and breathing. Pete Castiglione walked into this room; Pete Castiglione is walking out.

* * *

                Sirens call out to him; Frank pretends he doesn’t hear.

               Fight down the hall in the building; the cops come before it gets bad.

               Frank finds work in construction. Goes back to busting walls. Makes patrols of Hell’s Kitchen that don’t make no sense, not until he tracks Murdock to a new office space. There’s a paper in the window: Future Offices of Nelson, Murdock, & Page.

               Frank goes home that night. He lies on his good side listening to his bones creak, feeling his skin stretch. The incision itches. He plucks out the sutures, but they don’t scratch deep enough. Feels like something’s crawling under there, and he needs to get it out.

               The card on the table greets him when he goes for his keys in the morning and when he comes home in the dead of night. Frank couldn’t open it before, and he can’t now, not when the impact of his keys reveals the indent of something contained inside. A coin, maybe. A medal. A pendant. Nothing he deserves.

* * *

                He’s coming home late when he hears the fight down the hall. Broken glass, a tearful scream. The door to the apartment opens and a woman bursts out, weeping freely. She stops short and is tugged back, and Frank doesn’t let the door close again without him inside.

               The guy drops the girl and goes for Frank. “Run,” Frank tells her, and she does, and it feels good to not have an audience. Feels good to be alone in the room with a monster, to be laying hands on something that shouldn’t exist. Frank unmakes the guy: he breaks the guy’s fingers, he breaks the guy’s nose; he breaks the guy’s ribs and his cheek, bruises both kidneys, and then he shoves the guy’s head through a window.

               He drops the sack of shit. Stands there dumbly, chest heaving. His side hurting fresh as the day he woke up in hospital. But the itch is gone, or at least it’s less noticeable. Frank nabs the guy by the neck and drags him up, back towards the window, the sight of the ground below reminding him where this asshole really belongs.

               The thought holds him in position. Frank’s eyes dart between the asshole’s busted face and the ground, and for once, the calculation is jumbled in his head. A and B do not make C despite that voice in his head telling him all the time, every time. Hit ‘em so they stay down. Hit ‘em so they don’t get back up. Hit ‘em so they never get to hurt again.

               Pain in his side whites out his vision. Frank’s hands shake. He drops the guy, takes a step back, breathes a little to ground himself, get himself back to geared up. The guy starts laughing wetly. Frank barely hears what’s said exactly. It’s the tone that cuts him to the core, the tone that finally reminds him who he is and what he is meant to do.

               Frank picks the guy up by the neck and shoves him out the window. 

* * *

 

               The woman’s screaming in the hallway, but Frank barely hears her. His head is a muffled place, dense with cloud. He grabs his shit. Whole life fits into a duffel bag, so it’s not difficult. He grabs his keys; the card beams up at him from the table. He can’t bring himself to take it; the damn thing’s not for him. But Frank isn’t out his apartment door when he comes back, grabs it, shoves it in his back pocket, and gets the hell out.

* * *

                He reignites the old contacts. Gets himself a safehouse and supplies. Cuts off the mop of his hair, shaves himself to the scalp; can’t go to war looking like a hipster, so the beard follows. Frank scrubs a hand over his head, relishing that fire bursting in his veins, drowning out the irritated throb of his side. He chomps down a couple of Aspirin and lets them kick in while he spray paints a new vest.

               The card almost gets pinned to his peg board, but he can’t bring himself to stab it, even with a pin. His fingers trail over the indentations in the paper where the charm shows through. Frank shoves the damn thing in the drawer of his desk – out of sight, out of mind.

* * *

               Going to war is easy. Coming back to the safehouse is hard. Frank drags himself through the door, his footsteps growing heavier and heavier every night. His side inflamed and raging. A complement to anger when he’s out there in the streets, but he comes back to himself and it’s just pain, pain for pain’s sake. Whiting out his vision and knocking the air from his chest and kicking his ass to the curb for hours at a time.

               So he stays out there, where the pain galvanizes him. Where it makes him go one more round with human traffickers and fire one more bullet into that drug dealer and set one more charge in some wannabe crime lord’s bar. 

               Frank’s dismantling one such bar when the Devil arrives. Finally. Frank didn’t even realize he was waiting for the kid until he’s staring him straight in his dopey masked face. The Hallowe’en costume’s changed a bit: the kid’s gloves, boots, belt and neck are all crimson, but the rest of him is as black as Frank’s Kevlar.

               “Was wondering when you were gonna show up,” Frank allows himself to admit. He stalks towards the Devil, arms at his sides. He wants Red to feel what he’s done, to really appreciate the full magnitude of his war. “How yah been?”  
  
               “Better than you, Frank.”  
   
              Frank surveys the damage. The chaos. The corpses. He puts a hand to his side to get it to stop screaming. “Not doing too bad myself.”  
  
               “We’ll see about that.”

               Oh, the Devil’s in a mood if he’s using sarcasm. Frank greets his advance with a punch, and it’s the most satisfying swing he’s taken since coming back to the city. Everybody he’s put down, from that piece of shit wife-beater at the apartments to these assholes trying to start a syndicate, it’s all been practice, lead-up to this fight with the Devil. The Devil’s where the war’s always been and always will be. The Devil’s what put him in a hospital bed when he should’ve been busting caps in sharpshooters, when he should have been finishing what he started with Wilson Fisk.

               Fisk, who’s sitting pretty, waiting for his next release from Super Max. Fisk, who the Devil could’ve killed but didn’t.

               The melee traverses the burning lengths of the bar. Smoke gets the better of the Devil, and Frank presses the advantage. He puts Red on the ground and lays into him with punches, straight into his right side, the same place on Frank that’s screaming for him to stop. But he can’t. He can’t stop till it’s over, and it ain’t over till the Devil doesn’t get back up.

               Frank stops suddenly, clouds bursting inside his skull. He’s awake, really awake, standing at the centre of a hurricane he made raging against a dumbass in a Devil costume. He grabs the kid and throws him, hard, into the bar. The Devil spits out a wad of blood and rises, shakily, back into the smoke. He charges Frank, and Frank takes it, grappling with the Devil until the kid’s blood-coloured hand lands a blow to his side.

               The car hits him all over again, but instead of blackness, Frank sees her feet: those two little beacons on the pavement. He springs out of the lock the Devil’s put him in, his eyes burning, side in agony. Unable to breathe, unable to think. Those little ghosts of her shoes are scorched into his retinas, and Frank needs to get away. He kicks the Devil in the face, hard enough that he can escape, but not so hard the Devil can’t escape too.

* * *

                The incision’s opened up where the docs worked on his liver. Frank gets a needle prepped and starts stitching, but his hands are shaking so bad that he can’t finish. His arm falls, knocking against the bruises running from his hip to his upper back. It’s not that bad; he’s had worse, but telling himself that doesn’t make the chill in his veins go away. It doesn’t give him fine motor functions in his hands. It doesn’t let him breathe.

               “Hell of a night.”

               “Jesus Christ.” The adrenaline gives Frank the ability to reach for his gun, to put the Devil in his crosshairs. Dumbass kid’s appeared out of thin fucking air, and it would serve him right, getting shot, for sneaking into a safehouse Frank designed to be Devil-proof. “I am giving you three seconds –“

               “You’re in bad shape, Frank.” 

               “- one –“  
  
               “You pull that trigger, we’re both gonna die here.”

               “- two –“

               “Put the gun down.”

               Frank’s arm drops. He lets out a yell, unable to pull it back up. He’s draining out of himself, and the Devil’s getting closer, and, “You’re not gonna stop me, Red. You can’t stop me. I’m back, yah hear me? I’m back to finish what you can’t. Back to fix what you broke!”  
  
               Red scoffs. “I broke a lotta things.”  
  
               “You know damn well what I’m talking about!” but Frank’s jaw drops on its hinges before he can say more. His eyelids crash down and shit, it’s wrong, it’s so wrong. He slept through the shooter at the _Bulletin_ and he missed his shot at Fisk, and now the Devil’s here to make some bullshit point about mercy and justice, but Frank’s got it, okay? Been there, done that, got hit with a car and everything.

               Bright side to passing out is that Frank doesn’t have to listen.

* * *

                Waking comes slow. Frank drags himself through the murk. Blood like sludge in his veins. He’s the site of impact. He’s the aftermath of an explosion. Head’s so full of shit, it’s gonna take days for the dust to settle.

               He reaches for his side under the blanket that’s covering him, curious about the pain. It’s different: cleaner, somehow, uncomplicated. Fresh bandages cover his waist; Frank lifts the edges to see a clean row of sutures in place, perfectly spaced and neatly laid. Couple of ice packs hug the bruises along his back. His lungs are full of char and ash, but ain’t nothing the Devil can do about that.

               Footsteps creak on the floor. Frank huffs and lets his arms fall. He tries to sit up and can’t; his body isn’t taking orders anymore. Fine – he doesn’t have to move. Devil can hear as well as he can fight. “I ain’t quitting.”  
  
               “What happened, Frank?” Red asks.

               Frank ignores him: “City’s in the shit, Red, you know that?”  
  
               “Some of your ribs are broken –“

               “You’re not dead six months and –“  
  
               “- and you’re still healing from surgery –“

               “- you got some asshole running around in your suit killing reporters –“  
  
               “Someone do this to you?”  
  
               “- and taking shots at your girlfriend! At your partner! They could’ve died, Red, you know that?”

               Red finally joins his side of the conversation, impossibly calm and collected: “Yes, I know that.”

               “ _You_ could’ve died!” Frank adds, the words bubbling up and out of the fugue.  
  
               “I handled it,” Red says, advancing out of the shadows where he’s been hiding. The Devil rearing his head. “I handled it, and I did it my way, Frank, not yours! I did it my way, and I won!”   
  
               Frank ignores that shit. “You think you won: Wilson Fisk is back in a prison cell waiting for the next round, and you think you won.”  
  
               “What the hell do you want? You want me to kill Wilson Fisk? Then why’d you turn me down on the boat that night?”

               “I should’ve been here,” Frank says. “I should’ve been here! God damn it!”

               “But you weren’t,” Red replies.  
  
               “No!” Frank draws several shaking breaths, his chest alight with the messy kind of agony he’s become so accustomed to: broken ribs burning over the slash of his surgical incision. Frank can’t get his lungs emptied fast enough to make way for all the ways his body wants to hurt. “Fuck, no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t, and I should’ve been. I should’ve…I could’ve ended it. I could’ve ended it all.”  
  
               His eyelids droop; the room spins. Red’s face, unmasked now, hovers in his periphery, and for once, the blurriness to his vision is a blessing. Makes the softness in Red’s expression harder to see.

               “Where were you, Frank?” Red asks.

               Frank draws a breath and holds it under his broken ribs. “Not here.” He wants to leave it at that, but he coughs, and the answer bubbles out of him. “North…northwest. Washington state.” He glances at Red, stopping the little shit before he can ask why. “We took the kids out there once. Camping. Wanted to see it again. Get the hell out of the city. Get the hell away from…away from this. But you can’t outrun yourself, Red.”

               “No,” Red agrees, in a tone that tells Frank that he tried. “What happened?”

               “Stupid,” Frank says.

               “Getting hit by a car is stupid.”

               “Yeah, it fucking is, but I didn’t just get hit by a fucking car, smartass.” Christ, the hell is he running from at this point: the kid knows. The kid’s known since the bar that something was up, and he obviously took his time stitching to pick out the broken ribs and the bruises, to piece together what’s clearly written on Frank’s body.

               “I did something,” Frank says.

               “What?”  
  
               “Something.”

               Red’s infuriatingly silent. No scoff or huff or eye roll. He’s standing there bearing silent witness and God damn it, it’s working. Frank is compelled to fill the void between them. “There was a kid. Little girl. She dropped something in the crosswalk and ran back to get it. Necklace or something. I don’t know. She –“

               He closes his eyes and sees her shoes on the pavement. White, pristine, gleaming in the sunlight. Lisa had a pair like them, bought for church, but she loved ‘em so damn much, she wore them with everything.

               “The car was coming. Didn’t even try to break, just ripped right through the intersection. And she sees it. She knows. Her mom’s screaming and running from her side of the street. But I get there. I’m right there, and I get her out of the way just in time for that car to put me into the pavement.”

               Frank anticipates smugness on the kid’s part, an “I told you so,” but Red’s eyes are pointed away from him. He’s tilted his face away, towards the darkness, and instead of pride, it’s a look of understanding, of agreement, a look of having been where Frank’s been.

               He looks back to the ceiling, his eyes drifting out of focus. “What the hell does it mean, Red? What the hell…? I should’ve been dead. I could’ve been here. Instead, I’m in a hospital bed, napping while the shit hits the fan. While people are dying. My people.”

               “It sounds like you were exactly where you needed to be.”  
  
               He shakes his head, refusing to accept that. “The car should have killed me.”

               “It would have killed her,” Red says.

               “People are dead. That piece of shit who killed them is in a hospital, and Fisk is in prison.”  
  
               “But she’s alive. That little girl is alive, Frank, and her mother is alive, and they got to walk away from that intersection because of you.”

               “What the hell does it mean? The hell does it mean, I save them and I’m not here?”

               Red doesn’t even hesitate before answering: “God speaks in whispers –“

               “Shit, don’t come at me with the God stuff.” Frank closes his eyes, counts to ten, gets to three before, “Really, Red? You wanna bring God into this?”

               “You don’t?”  
  
               “No. Especially not from some dumbass dressed up like the fucking devil.”  
  
               Red smirks. His head bobs back into Frank’s line of vision. “You saved lives, Frank.”

               “But what does it mean – I save lives and pieces of shit like Fisk get saved too.”

               “I’m not going to let you kill Fisk.”  
  
               “I’m not going to let you stop me.”  
  
               Now the Devil rolls his eyes. “If you could go back and do it again different, would you?”

               Frank knows exactly where this leads, and he doesn’t want it. Doesn’t want to hear it. He’s been listening to this shit all the way across the country, playing out in the back of his head. “Fuck off.”  
               “Would you let that little girl and her mother die so that you could be here to go after Fisk?”

               “People get hit by cars. Happens every day. Not everybody gets shot down like dogs because men like Wilson Fisk are allowed to keep on breathing.”

               “No,” Red admits, “but we can’t save everyone, Frank. We save the ones we can, and we hope that it’s enough.”  
  
               Frank furrows his brow. He side-eyes the Devil. “What’d you just say?” Red tries to explain, but no, no, Frank doesn’t need to hear it again. He heard the Devil loud and clear; didn’t make any sense, that’s all. “Did you just say that? You?” He stares into the ceiling. “What the hell…? How hard did that building land on your head? You get body-snatched or something?”

               Red allows himself the faintest hint of a smile. “I’ve been where you are, Frank.”  
  
               “Bullshit.” But Frank realizes part of what’s been pissing him off so much lately is how close they’re getting, him and the damn Devil. That so many of his decisions – to go out west, to come back and go to war – are looking more red than black lately.

               They’re silent for a while. The safehouse creaking around them; the city outside held at bay. People out there fighting and killing, and Frank in here, cooped up with his broken body and the fucking Devil, listening, knowing there’s not enough bullets in the world to make it all stop. And somewhere, across the country, a little girl and her mother are holding each other tight, not because of a bullet but because someone took the blow that was meant for them.

               Frank glances at Red, expecting rage on his part, but instead there’s simply exasperation. He ran across the country to escape the Devil’s shadow only to find that he’s had the Devil inside him all along. 

               “That little girl and her mother,” Red says, breaking the hallowed quiet but only _just_ with his voice, “Are they enough?”  
  
               “For now,” Frank says, mostly to end the conversation.

               The Devil smiles. “That’s the spirit.” 

* * *

 

               Red’s still there when Frank wakes. Must have left at some point, though, because he’s changed out of his armour for a pewter sweater and black pants. Safehouse smells like breakfast and coffee, courtesy of the take-out sitting on the desk.

               Frank glares. “Don’t you have somewhere to be? A fancy new office to set-up?”  
  
               A smile lights the kid’s eyes from behind his glasses. “And how would you know about my fancy new office?”

               Frank groans as he sits up on the bed. He lets that be the answer to Red’s question.

               The kid takes his tiny-ass victory for what it is – _nothing_ – and proceeds to point out the pills and water he left by the cot. Frank gives Red a small toast with the glass in thanks, but that’s all Red’s getting. He isn’t doing anyone any favours by sticking around. Case in point: he starts in on Frank about punishing people not two bites into breakfast.

               “Stop,” Frank warns him.

               “You stop,” Red warns him right back. “As far as the cops are concerned, Frank Castle’s dead. Pete Castiglione lived four doors down from a man whose battered wife insists she pushed him out a window in self-defence. And they’re chalking up the killings to copycat killings.”

               “Of Punisher?”

               “No,” the kids sighs, “Of Daredevil. Well, the man pretending to be Daredevil.”

               Frank forces himself to swallow. The pit in his guts splits wider, and a snaking sensation of falling into the abyss creeps up his spine into the base of his brain. Been fighting against explosions in his chest, and now there’s nothing but cold, empty darkness, and it’s shit. He can’t eat anymore. “There’s gonna be more,” he says.

               “I can handle it.”  
  
               “God damn it, Red.”

               Red continues as if he doesn’t hear, because he doesn’t. Listens to heartbeats in the midst of a gunfight, but he blocks out people sitting ten feet away when they even imply shit he doesn’t like. “You told me that people don’t come back when they cross a line, but you did come back, Frank. You could come back again.”

               “It doesn’t work like that, Red.”

               “ _It did_ ,” Red insists, “and it can again.”

               “Jesus, what do I have to do? What do I have to do to get it through your thick skull that it doesn’t work like that?”  
  
               “What _can_ you do?” the kid asks. He laughs lightly. “Seriously, Frank, what can you possibly do that you haven’t done already?”  
  
               Frank can’t help but marvel at him as he takes another shot: “You’re so fucking used to disappointment.”  
  
               Red smirks. “That’s Catholicism.”

               “I’m not going to stop.”

               “Neither am I,” Red says.

               He finishes his coffee with a flourish; Frank forces another bite of breakfast into his mouth. They sit there stewing, occasionally tossing barbs, until Red finally tosses his coffee cup into he bin across the room _with perfect fucking accuracy_ , makes this big show of picking up his cane – because he’s blind, remember? – and heads for the door. “See you round, Pete.”

               “No, you won’t.”

               Red doesn’t hear him: “Oh, if you walk past the office again, come inside? Say hi?”

               “I come past your office, I’m coming up there to wipe that smug-ass expression off your face, you piece of –“ Frank staggers to his feet, fighting his side with every step. The sight of the little shit waving and walking off into the day doesn’t help. God damn, Frank is going to kick his ass next time.

               He looks around the room, but the Devil’s tidied up after himself. Bags are in the bin, coffee’s drank, first aid kit’s cleaned up. Frank is about to sit down again, satisfied, when he notices the envelope on the desk. PETE written in big letters, little butterfly and flower drawings; the imprint of the coin or whatever’s inside beaming up at him.

               Frank curses. The Devil, the God damn Devil. Snooping around his shit. He staggers over to the card and tries, once again, to rip it up, but instead Frank finds himself opening it. A necklace spills into his hand: a new chain gleams on an old pendant. Next to that is a handmade card, the words Thank You printed across the front in the same crayon-scrawl as his name – Pete’s name – on the envelope.

               He opens it up.

               “Dear Pete” – stop, he needs to stop. Frank folds the card back up and grips it tight in his hand, but seeing it wrinkled screams of a disrespect he can’t fathom, and he straightens it out again, reopening it in the process. “We tried to visit, but you were asleep, so I made you this. Thank you for saving my life. It was really brave and nice of you. Mommy says you can come visit if you’re ever in Spokane. Our phone number is –“

               Frank closes the card. He drops it onto his desk, along with the necklace. The pendant stares up at him with the face of the Virgin and her child. He flips it over, guts roiling. They had one for Lisa like that. Lisa at her first communion. Lisa in her white shoes and white dress. Lisa in his arms, alive and happy.

               He picks up the chain, playing with it in his fingers. This isn’t a kid’s necklace anymore. Damn thing was so important it almost cost a little girl her life, and now she’s given it away to the stranger who saved hers.

               The number stares up at him from the card, the card made for Pete. The card made for a man who doesn’t exist, can’t exist. Just last night Frank was out spitting bullets and setting bonfires, and this little girl wants him to wear her necklace with the Virgin Mary when he comes to visit in Spokane.

               He glances for his burner, and it’s right there, plugged into the charger. “God damn it, Red,” Frank says, reaching for it. He reopens the card and starts punching numbers. 

* * *

 

Happy Reading!

 


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